after it falls
by Echo1317
Summary: She lifts her gaze to his, and there, in the day's final fading moments, her stance defeated and her eyes still fighting, she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. And somehow, he knows that will never change.  -MattXElena, post 3x11-


Hello lovelies! New fandom got ahold of me, and I'm on a TVD kick. I did this piece at school when I finished a test, so it's a bit scrambly, but I hope y'all like it.

Disclaimer: Nothing here is mine. Ok? Ok.

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><p>He finds her on the edge of the Wickery Bridge, which is both surprising and not surprising at the same time.<p>

She's sitting on the edge of the wall, feet dangling over the water below. Her legs are swinging, her hands are resting on the warm stone as she leans back, just a little. The sunlight makes her tan skin glow, makes her hair shine like a crow's wings as it takes flight. It makes him think of when he first fell in love with her, with her vibrancy and honesty and kindness. She's always been this way, even when they were kids; as immobile as stone but constantly in motion, the most lovely thing in any room..

He puts the car in park in the middle of the lane and pulls the keys out of the ignition. When he gets out, he slams the door behind him, the only sign of the repressed anger that bubbles just beneath the worn-out worn-down surface. She doesn't turn or flinch or do anything as he walks up next to her, leaning his arms on the warm stone wall.

The silence isn't uncomfortable, but it never has been with them. Everything between them has always been easy, which is part of why he had liked being with her, and probably why she hadn't liked being with him. They didn't have to make an effort to make it work because it always just _did. _

Until it didn't.

"I lost my job." He says in a monotone, not really telling her so much as saying it out loud for himself to hear. He hasn't done that yet, admitted that and all that goes with it. No job, no income, no house. There goes the college fund, the meager amount that it is. There goes his future, his life as he knows it, any anything he has never called 'home'. It's not much, with his mother and father and sister gone, but it is his and he loves it for what it is. He can hold it together, here in the bridge, but he feels the panic creeping into his chest, making his heart feel constricted and breathing is just a little bit more difficult.

"I lost my mind." She says calmly, keeping her eyes on the horizon. He does the same, numb as the day he found out that his sister was dead. Nothing hurts because he can't feel anything at all. Later, he knows, he will fall apart, but for the moment he thinks that she has one-upped him. All of the vampires and werewolves and witches, oh my, you're bound to go crazy sometime, and he is just thankful that he isn't so far gone that it has happened to him.

Yet.

"You were right," She says it in the same far-away, dreamy voice. It's a scary voice, he thinks, cut off and dead to all the things she should care about. The fire is gone from her, bled out by the men who claim to love her, but never enough to let her go. He wants it back, because more, even, than the vibrancy and honesty and kindness, he loved her passion. It was that thirst for life, that want to go on that _kept_ him in love with her, even when she moved on and he did, too.

She's lost that, all of it, and it kills him a little bit inside to know that it's gone.

"Here lies me, hoper, dreamer and innocent," She sighs, stretching her toes down as far as they'll go, until it looks from a certain angle like they should skim the top of the water. "Here lies you, golden boy, football star and the best guy in the whole damn town."

He doesn't disagree out loud, but he doesn't agree with her, either. There are people in this town better than him, and she used to be one of them before the town took her and broke her. She was always so much stronger than him. It must have taken a lot of force, he thinks, to take down someone like that.

"This place is so _suffocating_," She goes on, frustration creeping into her words. "It gets to you. Everyone living, everyone who's dead, everything that's happened here," she shakes her head, "no one place should have that much history."

She's right, he knows, but how right can someone who's lost their mind be? He's not deep, so he doesn't bother dwelling on it. No matter how much he wants to question her, he can't, because even before he fell in love with her, she was the one person in the world he always, always trusted. And now, with no job and no family and no future staring him in the face, he believes her when she says, "We've got no place in this hell-hole."

Hell-hole was never a word he would've used to describe this place. Tiny. Unproductive. Unrelenting. Uninspired. Now hell-hole seems more applicable than any of them. "So what're we supposed to do about it?"

She shrugs delicately, a simple life of the shoulders that makes him think that maybe she's really not all there. She doesn't shrug, she doesn't just not know. That's not the girl he grew up with, who always had a Plan A and a Plan B and a contingency plan just in case her alphabet fell through.

"Drive?" She suggests, and he scoffs. She would never just jump in the car and go, she doesn't run from her problems, she faces them down with a firm stare and a great big fuck-you to whoever wants to mess her up.

Except lately she's been the one messing herself up. A bad bad boyfriend and an even worse kind-sorta-maybe potential love interest and a time to die every other week. She's become a martyr, a masochistic know-it-all who doesn't know what to give up or when to give in. To him, it looks like she's given everything by now.

"Maybe we don't belong here," He concedes. In the back of his mind, he's been thinking that for a while now. He's just a man- just a fragile, stupid human surrounded by monsters hell bent on getting their way. He should have split weeks ago, months ago, the first time he watched his girlfriend's eyes go black and glassy and full of hunger. He thought he had too much to lose to leave, but looking back at it now he's got _nothing_. Not here, and not anywhere else. "But where are we supposed to go?"

And even though she shrugs again, he is already latching onto the idea. Going, going, gone. They could be out of this town, out of the county, over the goddamn state lines by tomorrow morning. The world is big and he is so small that if it let it, it would swallow him whole. Maybe he wants it to.

"Anywhere," She says, and it sounds like a promise, though not to him, but to herself. "How fast can you run?"

It's his turn to shrug, because he honestly does not know. The only time he runs is for football, up and down a tiny field, going nowhere and going fast. How fast could be go if he could run without stopping? Without looking back?

"Gas costs money. So does food, shelter," He finds a protest because he is terrified to think that he actually has a chance to get out. For years, he has been afraid, afraid that he's not good enough, not good enough for his mother or for college or his friends or his girl. It wouldn't have been a surprise to him or, he secretly suspects, anyone else, if he never made anything out of himself. He has nightmares sometimes that he is stuck working at the Grill for the rest of his life, with God not even being merciful enough to have one of those monsters roaming the town put him out of his misery.

"Sleeping in the car isn't so bad," She argues, but she is back to the dead voice. Of course she's not serious, she can't be, not sounding like this. There is no conviction to what she is saying, but she is not giving in. She keeps making her case. "I've got some money put away for emergencies. I think this counts. It would be easy."

"Leaving everything you've ever known would be easy?" He questions, and immediately sees that that is the trouble for both of them. As much as he is afraid of being irrevocably _stuck _ in this place, he is even more afraid of leaving and finding out that he really is good for nothing. And then, in the same-but-not-the-same respect, she is more scared of staying than she is of leaving.

"What would we do?" He asks, because in his mind, he's run out of protests. Even if she isn't serious, he's almost made up his mind to get out of dodge before he can chicken out. If the world wants to swallow him, he'll let it. He doesn't want to be so alone anymore, so losing himself in the crowd out there is the next best option, isn't it?

"Drive." She says, this time more decisively. And this time she looks at him, and he sees that her eyes are _alive_. She is still there, the girl who he fell in love with when they were both small and nothing hurt worse than a skinned knee. Her eyes are warm, bright, brilliant, sparking with passion and conviction and every big and little moment that has led her to this decision. Yes, her eyes say, the eyes that he learned to read when he was young and that he finds that he can still read perfectly. "Run away with me. Please."

That 'please' drives a metaphorical stake through his heart.

Back when they were kids seems like a very long time ago, it suddenly occurs to him, but he can still see it very clearly. Blond pigtails and big eyes. Curly hair and chubby hands. He misses that youth because he feels very old now, though he supposes that eighteen should feel like a hundred when someone's seen as much as he has. And she's been through even more.

Even back then, he couldn't deny her anything, even if it wasn't something he could particularly afford. A new set of a hundred crayons in second grade. A sterling silver garnet necklace for her fifteenth birthday. Concert tickets the week before the crash.

Dropping everything to take her away from this god forsaken place _right now. _

So it's not surprise to either of him when, after a few long moments of silence, all he says is, "They'll track us down."

Not just their old gang will be looking for them. It'll be those brothers, too, the two that can never quite seem to get along except when it comes to her. If it weren't for them she wouldn't be so ready to go in the first place. It's not fair that they'll be the ones to drag her back. Unless that insane hybrid and his siblings decide to run after them, but that's a whole different mess of shit.

"Then we'll make a game out of how long it takes them to catch us." She's back to looking at the water now, so he is, too. He wonders why she's not at the car already, why she's not running to put herself in the passenger's seat even though she has always been the driver. Whatever else this place has done to her, it has beaten her down so much that she is not in control anymore. It always used to be that he followed her lead. Now, she is waiting for him.

It is an absolutely terrifying thing, he finds, to be depended on by someone like that. And he is going to let her lean on him anyway.

Because this is how they work. Their relationship is give and take, give and take, though mostly, lately, it has been take, on both their parts. He'll give her what she wants, anything she wants. After all, she would do the same for him.

She seems to take his silence as hesitation, even though it's really just him confirming what she suspected all along. "Okay," she pulls something out of her pocket, "I'll make you a deal."

As far as he knows, the deal she makes are always fair, so he'll hear her out, even though his mind has already been made up. What she holds up is a silver quarter, glinting in the last of the day's light. That's the one thing he still likes about here anymore: the sunsets are always gorgeous. They take the ordinary, uninspired greens and browns and grays and paint them in different hues; pinks and yellows and oranges and reds that set their whole tiny, condensed world on fire. Those colors are painted now on the between her fingers, on the lines of her face and the dark of her and the tan of her skin. He eyes are still alive. And he knows she's still there.

"Heads we stay," She whispers, turning and folding one leg beneath her so that she's facing him, looking down at the coin. Her shoulders are hunched forward, her spine curved, the weight of the whole world resting on her. "Tails we go."

He thinks back, _way_ back, to their first date. She'd stayed composed, and he'd been a wreck all night. On the walk home, she'd held his hand, and kissed him goodnight on her front porch. She'd smiled at him, radiant in the most pure of ways, and he'd seen their whole life flash before him: the wedding, the kids, the holding her hand until the very last moment when they both slipped off. More recently, he's wondered if there's anything he could've done to keep that. Now he wonders if he might be about to get it all back.

She lifts her gaze to his, and there, in the day's final fading moments, her stance defeated and her eyes still fighting, she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. And somehow, he knows that will never change.

He nods, and her lips _just_ turn up at the corners.

She flips the coin.

_I love you_, he wants to say, but he'll save that for after it falls.

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><p>Reviews are much appreciated.<p>

-Rachel


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